This paper fills a literature gap on the economic rationale and implications of moratoria on accommodation development in mature tourism destinations. Moratoria are government-led capacity controls, which reduce market competition and seek to create economic rents. The paper provides a comprehensive set of economic foundations justifying the enactment of moratoria in situations characterised by over-capacity, low profitability, little innovation, environmental damage, strategic behaviour and sectoral imbalances. It notes that the implementation of these controls could be related to regulatory capture, rent seeking and clientelism. While capacity controls can restrain tourism over-expansion and can help fix some of its undesirable consequences, they may lead to multiple and varied unforeseen effects on the rejuvenation process and on the rest of the economy, issues also addressed in the paper. Moratoria relate to the concept of de-growth, which is a highly contested area of discussion. A moratorium does not ensure renovation of private and public capital or maintain the natural environment. It may give rise to detrimental strategies by firms, opening up room for corruption. To be effective, a moratorium must be accompanied by complementary policies, besides being coherently embodied in a broader tourism and regional rejuvenation strategy.

Contemporary challenges in destination management, particularly those related to sustainability, tourism behavior, and mobility, require granular, local-scale data to inform public and private sector decisions. However, the traditional international tourism statistics standards, such as IRTS 2008 and TSA:RMF 2008, have focused on national and, to a lesser extent, regional scales, overlooking local destinations as a relevant level for the measurement and analysis of tourism. As a result, no common conceptual framework has been available for producing statistical information for local destinations, despite tourism impacts being primarily felt at this level. The endorsement by the United Nations in 2024 of the new Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism (SF-MST 2024) has addressed this gap, marking a crucial shift toward recognizing local tourism destinations within sustainability measurement. In this conceptual paper, the recent local turn within this new international statistical standard is explored. Furthermore, by comparing SF-MST 2024 with previous documents, an extended conceptual framework for tourism statistics is developed, including the spatial dimension. Finally, in this paper, the implications for the implementation of the framework in local tourism destinations are discussed.